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Black Hole Sun......

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Oldmanmatt:
Black Hole Sun........

It’s last Thursday afternoon, day off training. I’m riding the metro into BCN for a wander around, coffee, check out the gear shops. My phone rings, it’s my wife.... “Hey Babe, I’m on the Metro; I’ll call you back in five”....

Won’t you come.........?

I get off at the next stop, Urquinaona, run up to the little park in the centre of the square. Re-dial.... “The good news is” she says “is I don’t have DVT”. She laughs. “I have a lump, pressing on a vein in my groin”.
I can’t breathe, a solitary tear springs from my eye and I try to sink deeper into the shade. My mind, in a split second, races through the last year and a half of watching her dragged through Chemo, Radiotherapy, angina attacks, abscesses, stoma bags... Hell... That blessed all clear back in October...

And wash away my pain............

“Mel (the Oncologist), says it’s almost certainly Cancer, they won’t know for sure until after the PET next week” (She’s laughing again! How can she laugh?).
I swallow; force the pounding heart out of my throat, “I'll get a flight home, as soon as I can..”
“No!” she interrupts, “I’m OK, you stay there until you get your money, we’re going to need it!”

Black Hole Sun.......

I try to train on Friday, the wall seems unreal. Someone has removed a crucial hold from my favourite warm up route and irrational anger sweeps over me. I always feel isolated, I have limited Spanish and no Catalan; today I might as well be on the Moon.  I try too hard and too many times to make a move on a problem I’d been working, strain my finger. I have to leave before anyone sees the tears....

Won’t you come............?

The dream is back. I’m there again, on South Georgia; the sun searing my face and eyes. I’m lost in a vast expanse of snow and ice, my feet frozen solid; my fingers starting to go...... I wake, drenched in sweat. I haven’t had the dream for ten years or more, not since I met Her.......

For fucks sake, wash away my pain............

andy popp:
You have mail Matt.

Oldmanmatt:
The Dream.........

It always begins the same way.

I’m alone, the silence of the Ice Cap wraps around me like a shroud.  Purple spots cloud my vision as the snow blindness takes hold. My Bolles were not worth the money, it seems.
Behind me, the silence is shattered by the unimaginable cacophony of another avalanche. I don’t even flinch anymore; it’s been my soundtrack for too long now. In front, the crevasse; a yawning, blue abyss.
My feet hurt, each step is an appalling agony and a voice at the back of my head whines with each step “you’re 21 and you’re going to lose your feet”. I push down the voice again, step back; slip a second axe from the holster on my harness.

Breathe, run, leap.......

Desperate scrabbling, panting and I’m standing again. Holster the axe, push down the voice; cling to the routine. Force the pace, keep moving.
 
The Sun is my enemy. In a few hours it will dip just below the horizon, relief from the terrible burning but then the Adiabatic will come tearing down from the peaks behind. The temperature will crash (we’d recorded -50DegC the night before). In two days it will be Christmas Eve, in eleven days I will turn twenty two; cling to the routine, keep moving..........

It’s a few hours earlier, we haven’t slept in 36 hours or more. The Guy’s have collapsed, Roy’s feet are gone, Steve is concussed. We are shambling Zombies, there is little left of the men who set out from advanced Base, full of determination and life. It is (we will discover later) the warmest summer for five hundred years.  Our pathetic attempt to summit is beaten to a pulp, as around us the mountains shed five centuries of snow and ice.

 We had been descending when it happened, already mentally defeated. Five of us, strung out Alpine style. I lead, as the deputy leader; Steve (The boss and twenty years my senior) bringing up the rear. In the Serrac, below the summit ridge; we had scaled a fantastic Ice wall. In the cold half light of the Antarctic dawn it had been crisp, exhilarating. Now it was a slushy, deteriorating, heart pounding nightmare. At the base another mind boggling crevasse meant traversing to safer ground a hundred meters away. I made it, got my breath back, set up the belay. As each man descended, so we each moved a rope length away and dug in. It’s Steve’s’ turn, last man down but the ice face is too chewed up by our passage and......

There’s a shout, I look up, to see Steve tumbling, the screws not even holding long enough to tighten the rope. In a flailing arc, he disappears into the crevasse and as he does, we see the rope wrapped around his Crampon. He didn’t make a sound.

We stumble into the advance base, Steve is semi-conscious; the rest of us just shells. Going through the motions. Pete sets up the radio, it doesn’t work; but what’s the point anyway. We’re too far from the nearest Helo to expect rescue and there’s nowhere for a fixed wing to land. Our ship home isn’t due for another five days. We rest in the snow hole for the short night, dump the gear we’d sweated to bring in and begin the 20k trudge to base camp on the coast. There’s a more powerful radio there, just maybe we can raise the Garrison at Grytviken. As we walk I’m dreaming of rescue......

I’m back at the moment of collapse. I’m screaming, ranting “For God’s sake get up, you can’t sit down”! The Sun has turned the surface snow of the Ice Cap to slush; it seeps into your clothes and freezes again. To sit in this is to die. They won’t listen. Now a raving lunatic, I untie my line and turn away. Blind with rage and fear I begin pounding for the coast.  We are deep in the fracture section, marooned between crevasses; to move on un-roped is suicide, but I go anyway.....

The sun is on the horizon, it’s cold, so cold. A distant voice in my head calmly notes I’m crossing a patch of stones, at last; the compression section! No more crevasse! And, there a few K’s away, in the gloom, the tents! Safety!

Then it hits me.......... WHAT HAVE I DONE!!!

I can’t go on, I’m finished. I drop my pack, sit down. Bawling, gibbering “Oh God, where are they, what have I done!”
The cold is now my world, my mind wanders through tortured paths of memory and regret. I am broken.
I sit, numb, staring into the adiabatic as it mounts its nightly assault. I will sit here till the cold takes me and my sin no longer burns. It is what I deserve.....

“There's something red out there”. The voice is back, intruding on my sorrow and pathetic self pity. A blob becomes a figure, becomes a shuffling, unsteady, man. “It’s Steve” says the voice, I ignore it. The figure throws its self down beside me, without removing its’ pack. “He’s still out of it” says the voice as I stare at his glassy eyes. We don’t speak.

An hour or more has passed. There are now five figures, huddling in the bitter, slicing wind. Nobody has uttered a single sound. The gloom is lifting; one of the figures stumbles to its feet (who knows, now, who it was) and the others follow.
As we shuffle away, Roy turns and like a knife to my heart, he mutters “Thank you, for not giving up”.

They were not the same men............

Oldmanmatt:
I was alone...

When I met her...

Sitting at a table, in a Restaurant. She was beautiful. A child of the Carpathians, taking a year out; working in the restaurant (where her cousin was the manager). Enjoying the Dubai sunshine.
We smiled at each other, as she handed me the menu. Her eyes, the colour of Honey, with a mischievous glint. I waited for my friends; it was our semi-regular lunch time hangout. She took our order, brought our order; got it wrong......

Most days, I would get there before the others; order an iced coffee. We’d chat while I drank. Sometimes she’d bring over a whole pile of different used coffee glasses and then she’d tease my friends about how long they’d made me wait.......

I was a broken man, again, my wife of ten years; had left me the year before. I'd just turned thirty a few weeks ago. Much to the amusement of my friends, I didn’t notice; that she always took our order, always got it wrong.
 
Oh, I was enchanted by her but I couldn’t bring myself to make the move; too many doubts. Finally, one of my friends, in exasperation; wrote my number on his card and gave it to her. I didn’t know and that same afternoon I skived work, went back to the restaurant to give her my number. I did it, stuttering, her cousin giggling behind her. She smiled and said “Thanks, but I already have it”. Shame faced, I rushed out.......... She had my number but she hadn’t called me! I’ve just made a right tit of myself haven’t I......?

She called me an hour later. Yes, she’d very much like to go on a date with me. Her night off was the next day, she was living in Sharja. Perhaps I could meet her there in the Gold Souk?  Seven thirty? YES, A THOUSAND TIMES YES!

Ten years ago, almost to the day.....

Today is “Patient conference” day. The many Doctors and Medics who handle her case are sitting together as I write. There is no formality between us, it’s always first names; never “Doctor” this or “Professor” that. Each and every one, has taken us to one side and passed us their home and mobile numbers; “call me, any questions, any time”......

She was late. I’d been early, already on my third coffee. My phone rang, an unfamiliar female voice “She’s on her way, running late and doesn’t have a phone, so asked me to call”. I started to breathe again..........

Then stopped......

She’d come around the corner; little black top, tight (oh so tight) red trousers and black heels.  I’d only ever seen her in her work clothes and she’d been beautiful; but this was a knock out......!

Tomorrow is the PET scan. She called me, to discuss bland, domestic, things. Chirpy, efficient and casually tacking the PET thing on to the end. The PET will tell us if the tumour is “active” and if it has spread (well, it’s already spread, the original tumour burned away in a maelstrom of radiation). On this, all our hopes and fears are riding.
 
To her, it’s a footnote........

Oldmanmatt:
Why am I doing this.......?

I haven’t written an essay for twenty years (and then, only, late at night; a few hours before it was due on the lecturer’s desk); and even then, dry, technical........... Stuff.

I don’t keep a diary, don’t blog. An occasional FB comment. I don’t write.

I draft reports, precise, logical. An engineer to the core.....

I sat at the computer on Saturday morning. I’d strained my finger, the day before. Rain was forecast. There was no chance of climbing away from reality. I was on the site, commenting on strains, browsing through blogs. Numb

I closed the browser and without conscious volition, opened Word.

It’s five PM on Monday, I’ve been writing for three days. Short, surreal, disconnected, ramblings and memories. I don’t know why.

Why am I posting this, here.........?

I don’t know. I just felt I had to put it somewhere, somewhere other than a folder in “My documents”. Somewhere.......
Someone might read it. Not too many. Unseen faces, people, climbers like me.

 It will stay there, until the moderators get tired of it clogging up the bytes.

Just like us.....

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